Death and deities: A social cognitive perspective

The universality of religious belief—in supernatural agents: gods, ghosts, souls, spirits, and their ilk—is, no doubt, the product of a whole host of interacting causal factors. However, the notion that such beliefs are driven by fear of death recurs throughout intellectual history. Although recent social psychological research provides some support for this claim, the relationship between mortality-related concerns and religious belief becomes clearer in light of so-called “dual-process models”, which allow for both conscious and unconscious levels of cognition. Religion, it turns out, might well be such a powerful buffer of death-related anxiety because it provides a worldview in which we can consciously participate as well as anxiety-reducing supernatural beliefs that we might unconsciously hold, regardless of our religious commitments.

In 2001, between 60 and 70 million Hindus—the largest gathering of people in human history—flocked to Prayag, India for the Purna Kumbh Mela, a pilgrimage held every 12 years. The journey, regardless of its spiritual benefits, comes with significant physical risk: Many pilgrims who ritually bathe in the Ganges River, notoriously polluted with human and industrial waste, contract infectious diseases such as cholera, hepatitis, typhoid, and dysentery; others are crushed to death in stampedes. And Hinduism is hardly unusual in this regard. Believers from all major religions undertake perilous pilgrimages, engage in risky rituals, and sacrifice financial well-being and bodily pleasures to please their gods.

We have perhaps grown accustomed to the less exotic costs of religious belief, but the fact remains that gods exact a high price in terms of resources (e.g., religious charity), time (e.g., daily prayer), and reproductive opportunities (e.g., premarital chastity), while remaining frustratingly elusive. Unlike everyday objects, “supernatural agents”, be they cosmic gods, tribal deities, or ancestral spirits, are not directly detectable via normal sense perception (or else exist in an unreachable realm). And yet, as expensive and elusive as they are, supernatural agents are believed in by billions of people all over the world and throughout history. Why are humans—at great expense and with little sensory evidence—incorrigibly religious?

Theories of religion

Everyone— layperson and scholar alike—seems to have pet theories about this; the history of ideas is replete with attempted explanations of religious belief. In general, these have tended to suggest that religious belief is useful in some way or fulfills some need or desire. Émile Durkheim (1915/1967) and Karl Marx (1843/1970), for example, focused on the usefulness of religion at the societal level. In the former case, religious groups (and by extension, beliefs, rituals, and structures) evolved to maintain and strengthen social cohesion. In the latter case, religious beliefs developed to distract the impoverished masses from their plight, thus enabling their own oppression. In a similar vein, modern evolutionary psychologists hypothesize about the adaptive functions of religious belief, such as for health (Bulbulia, 2004), group flourishing (Wilson, 2002), and mating (Bering, 2011). However, much psychological theorizing has centered around the supposedly crippling fear of death. According to Freud (1927/1961, p. 22), for example, religions “must exorcise the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death”. Similarly, Feuerbach (1851/1967, p. 276) concluded his Lectures on the Essence of Religion with the claim that “the meaning and purpose of God are immortality” and Bronislow Malinowski (1948, p. 47) exclaimed, “Of all sources of religion, the supreme and final crisis of life – death – is of the greatest importance.”

Religion and the terror of death

In social psychology, the hypothesis that religion is driven by the fear of death has been most strongly forwarded by Terror Management Theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Vail, Rothschild, Weise, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2010). Drawing heavily from the work of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (e.g., 1973), TMT begins with the observation that human beings are, perhaps uniquely, aware of their mortality. This recognition of our inevitable death elicits crippling existential anxiety or fear of death, which must be dealt with if we are to function in the world. We are therefore motivated to seek immortality—whether literal or symbolic—and this quest involves embedding ourselves in cultural worldviews or belief systems, which prescribe means for obtaining it. Although TMT researchers do not offer formal definitions of “literal” and “symbolic” immortality, it is generally agreed that cultural worldviews offer literal immortality through afterlife concepts (e.g., immortal souls, heaven, reincarnation, nirvana) and symbolic immortality through lasting culturally-valued identifications and achievements, and the increased self-esteem they engender (e.g., Dechesne, Pyszczynski, Arndt, Ransom, Sheldon, van Knippenberg, & Janssen, 2003; Greenberg, Landau, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, in press). Because supernatural agents have the power to grant immortality, and are themselves examples of the possibility of such, belief in them is an effective way to assuage the finality of death.

One problem with such a view is that the afterlives that many religions promise are arguably more terrifying than death itself. Many religious belief systems posit gloomy graves or horrific hells. According to their own religious texts (cf. Iliad), Homeric Greeks, regardless of merit, all descended into a dreary Hades, while ancient Mesopotamians were infamously cast into a terrifying netherworld populated by monsters (cf. The Netherworld Vision of an Assyrian Crown Prince) or a despairing one in which “dust is their food, clay their bread” and “they see no light, they dwell in darkness...over the door and the bolt, dust has settled” (cf. The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld; Dalley, 1998, p. 155). Historically, and also contemporarily, eternal torment in Hell is a subjectively real possibility in various Christian denominations. Calvinists, for example, experience “salvation anxiety”, as each individual’s eternal fate is determined unilaterally by God and unaffected by human effort (Mather, 2005, p. 4; Munzer, 2005). Indeed, this anxiety can be so entrenched that many ex-fundamentalists still report experiencing intense fear of divine punishment even after they have abandoned such beliefs (Hartz & Everett, 1989). These anthropological findings at least call into question the universality and priority of death-anxiety reduction as a motivating force for religious belief.

Another question regarding TMT is how to distinguish between the two routes by which religion theoretically reduces fear of death. It is easy to see how religious worldviews—at least those with comforting afterlife beliefs—can provide literal immortality: they promise that, despite appearances, physical death is not final. But religious worldviews also provide symbolic immortality by allowing people to feel like valuable parts of something larger and more enduring than themselves (Landau, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2004; Vail et al., 2010). Indeed, Becker (1971, 1975) and Greenberg et al. (in press) suggest that religious worldviews offer symbolic immortality more effectively than do secular worldviews, thanks to their self-esteem-enhancing notions of cosmic significance. How can we determine whether supernatural agents are comforting in themselves, or by virtue of their association with individuals’ worldviews, or both?

Testing the relationship between fear of death and religious belief

One seemingly simple approach to the question would be to ask whether people who are relatively receptive to religious beliefs do indeed feel comforted about death, even when they do not hold a religious worldview. However, the theoretical relation between religiosity and death anxiety is not as straightforward as it appears. For those who already have a religious worldview, religious belief may be available as a resource to buffer anxiety, but for those who do notbelieve, anxiety might provide a motivation to do so, such that these individuals are more inclined to believe as their anxiety increases. Thus, the relation between religious beliefs and fear of death may depend on prior religious commitment: as atheists increasingly fear death they are increasingly tempted to believe in God, whereas those who already believe in God successfully use that belief to allay their fear of death.

Indeed, although the correlational data on religiosity and death anxiety are mixed and inconclusive (Donovan, 1994), some sense may be made of them by taking into account participants’ prior religious leanings. For example, Harding, Flannelly, Weaver, and Costa (2005), surveyed Christians and found negative correlations between death-related anxiety and belief in God and an afterlife, whereas Dezutter et al. (2009) studied a predominantly non-religious sample and found a positive relationship between fear of death and literal interpretations of Christian faith. Relatedly, Cohen, Pierce, Chambers, Meade, Gorvine, and Koenig (2005) found that death-anxiety was negatively correlated with Protestants’ “intrinsic religiosity” (roughly, the extent to which they embrace religious beliefs as important in themselves; Allport & Ross, 1967), but positively correlated with “extrinsic religiosity” (roughly, the extent to which their beliefs are merely useful means to some other practical end; Allport & Ross, 1967). Similarly, in our own recent survey of university students, the half who identified themselves as religious reported less fear of death to the extent they endorsed the existence of supernatural agents and events (God, angels, heaven, etc.), whereas the half who identified as non-religious showed the reverse trend: for them, greater fear of death was associated with a stronger inclination toward religious belief (Jong, Bluemke, & Halberstadt, 2012; for conceptually similar results see: Aday, 1984–1985; Dolnick, 1987; Downey, 1984; Leming, 1979– 1980; McMordie, 1981; Nelson & Cantrell, 1980; Wen, 2010; Wink & Scott, 2005).

The fact that non-religious people—atheists, agnostics, as well as the more nominally non-religious—appear to seek solace in religious beliefs, seems to argue that these beliefs are comforting in themselves (presumably via their implications for literal immortality), and not because they fit their worldviews. But is increased anxiety about death the cause of enhanced religious belief? Or is decreased religious belief the cause of lower anxiety about death? Atheism is, after all, a worldview, and a positive correlation between anxiety and religious belief may simply reflect that, like their Christian counterparts, atheists relieve their existential anxiety by bolstering their own beliefs, which in their case happen to include a denial of God.

A few experimental studies have attempted to identify the causal direction in the relation between death anxiety and religious belief, and while many of these studies find that religious individuals bolster their belief in the face of death, the critical data for non-religious individuals are far more equivocal. For example, Weisbuch, Seery, and Blascovich (2005), found that increasing “mortality salience” (i.e., death-related thoughts) led non-believers to further diminished religiosity, but Osarchuk and Tatz (1973) found no effect in this group. Norenzayan and Hansen (2006) similarly found no effect on non-religious participants but, interestingly, found that mortality salience increased Christians’ belief in non-Christian supernatural agents like Buddha and Shamanic spirits, suggesting that such belief serves a purpose beyond mere worldview defense.

Part of the explanation of the diversity of these findings may relate to the corresponding diversity of measures of religious belief, which variously assess behaviours, attitudes about religion, or even attitudes about attitudes about religion, which do not necessarily assuage death anxiety to the same extent, or at all. For example, Burling (1993) found no effect of mortality salience on individuals’ attitudes toward religion as a belief system (e.g., “It is necessary to have religious belief”), ignoring the critical distinction between thinking something is good or valuable and thinking that it is true. Indeed, mortality salience might well alter one’s inclination to believe in God, while leaving one’s opinion regarding the necessity of this belief (e.g., for salvation, for moral life) unchanged.

Even more important, the bulk of previous research relies on overt, usually unsubtle self-report measures of religious belief, and there are two reasons, well-established in previous social cognitive research, that the subtlety of a measure might affect experimental outcomes (e.g., Fazio & Olson, 2003; Wittenbrink & Schwarz, 2007). First, individuals might not want to report their own beliefs, either because their beliefs are socially undesirable, or because they are motivated to provide the experimenter with an answer that fulfills his or her expectations. For example, atheists who take pride in their rationalistic skepticism might be reluctant to report any increased inclination toward supernatural belief, especially in the context of a scientific experiment.

Second, individuals may not be able to report accurately on their own beliefs, because they may not be consciously aware of them or able to access them on demand (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). It is near orthodoxy among social psychologists that some beliefs are held or formed automatically and even unconsciously, and that these beliefs may be independent of consciously held beliefs. This literature is now replete with “dual-process models” of cognition, which distinguish between conscious and unconscious cognition (e.g., Bargh & Chatrand, 1999; Chen & Chaiken, 1999; Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006; Nosek, 1997; Sperber, 1997). Although there is still much empirical and theoretical work to be done on such models, it is clear that traditional self-report measures are inadequate to capture the full spectrum of how attitudes are represented and processed.

Although there is no formal dual process model of religious cognition, there is increasing evidence that participants who explicitly deny religious belief may nevertheless behave like “implicit theists” (Uhlmann, Poehlman, & Bargh, 2008, p. 71). For example, in one study, participants who denied belief in the soul nevertheless declined to sell their souls to the experimenter, even though the contract was explicitly marked as bogus (i.e., “not a legal or binding contract, in any way”; Haidt, Björklund, & Murphy, 2000, p. 22). Similarly, Bering (2002) found that many “extinctivists”, who believe that “the self is wholly extinguished at death”, nevertheless implied that certain kinds of psychological functioning persisted after death. In this study, participants read a story about a person who unexpectedly dies in a vehicular accident; participants then answered a series of questions about the deceased character’s present states. While they had little trouble asserting the cessation of biological needs and psychobiological experiences (e.g., hunger), participants, extinctivists included, often endorsed statements that implied the post-mortem persistence of emotional (e.g., love for family member), desire (e.g., to be alive), and epistemic (e.g., knowledge that they were dead) states. Heywood (2010) interviewed atheists about major events in their lives, and found that they often saw intrinsic meaning or purpose in significant events, as though they occurred in order to teach them something or to convey some important message.

Such research suggests that religious functionalism in general, and the question of how non-religious individuals respond to death anxiety in particular, must take into account that people may hold beliefs of which they are not fully aware, or which are otherwise not consciously accessible on demand. Indeed, in our own work we have found that such beliefs respond differently to increased mortality salience than do beliefs that are consciously accessible (Jong, Halberstadt, & Bluemke, 2012). For example, after thinking about their own death, non-religious participants reported greater religious disbelief, according to a self-report questionnaire designed specifically to measure conscious belief in supernatural religious agents and events. However, when beliefs were measured indirectly (“implicitly”), by measuring the speed with which they affirmed or denied the existence of religious entities, participants from the same population were more religious under increased mortality salience conditions: death-anxious skeptics were no more likely to state that God exists, but they were slower to deny it. The results were conceptually replicated using a version of the “Implicit Association Test” (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), which assesses the cognitive strength of association between religious and existential concepts. These studies suggest that mortality salience leads both to conscious bolstering of one’s worldview (even if that worldview is anti-religious) and simultaneous bolstering of an unconscious belief in God.

Conclusions

The pervasiveness and persistence of religious belief is doubtless the product of complex and converging factors, many of which have yet to be identified. As social psychological research has shown, fear of death is likely an important part of the story of the gods, but its role may need to be understood in light of emerging insights into dual processing. At a conscious level, fear of death may lead to worldview defense, such that religious and non-religious individuals bolster their belief and disbelief respectively. However, at an unconscious level, fear of death may increase religious belief (or at least decrease religious skepticism), regardless of individuals’ conscious religious commitments. If so, religion may be a very powerful buffer of existential anxiety, allowing non-religious individuals to simultaneously pursue symbolic and literal immortality in the face of death.

Reference

Aday, R. H. (1984-1985). Belief in afterlife and death anxiety: correlates and comparisons, Omega, 15, 67-75.

Allport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5, 432-443.

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479.

Becker, E. (1971). The lost science of man. New York, NY: George Brazilier.
 
Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York, NY: Free Press.
 
Becker, E. (1975). Escape from evil. New York, NY: Free Press.
 
Bering, J. M. (2002). Intuitive conceptions of dead agents’ minds: the natural foundations of afterlife beliefs as phenomenological boundary. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2, 263–308.
 
Bering, J. M. (2010). Atheism is only skin deep: Geertz and Markússon rely mistakenly on sociodemographic data as meaningful indicators of underlying cognition. Religion, 40, 166-168.
 
Bering, J. (2011). The God instinct: the psychology of souls, destiny, and the meaning of life. London, UK: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
 
Bulbulia, J. (2004). The cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion. Biology and Philosophy, 19, 655-686.
 
Burling, J. W. (1993). Death concerns and symbolic aspects of the self: the effects of mortality salience on status concern and religiosity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 100-105.
 
Chen, S., & Chaiken, S. (1999). The heuristic-systematic model in its broader context. In S. Chaiken & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process theories in social and cognitive psychology (pp. 73-96). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
 
Cohen, A. B., Pierce, J. D., Chambers, J., Meade, R., Gorvine, B. J., & Koenig, H. G. (2005). Intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity, belief in the afterlife, death anxiety, and life satisfaction in young Catholics and Protestants. Journal of Research in Personality, 39, 307–324.
 
Dechesne, M., Pyszczynski, T., Arndt, J., Ransom, S., Sheldon, K. M, van Knippenberg, A., & Janssen, J. (2003). Literal and symbolic immortality: The effect of evidence of literal immortality on self-esteem striving in response to mortality salience.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 722-737.
 
Dezutter, J., Luyckx, K., & Hutsebaut, D. (2009). “Are you afraid to die?” Religion and death attitudes in an adolescent sample. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 37, 163-173.
 
Dalley, S. (1998). Myths from Mesopotamia: creation, the flood, Gilgamesh, and others. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
 
Dijksterhuis, A., & Nordgren, L. (2006). A theory of unconscious thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 95-109.
 
Dolnick, J. L. (1987). Fear, acceptance and denial of death: their relationship to afterlife beliefs, exposure to death and connectedness to religious orientation, Dissertation Abstracts International, 48 (2B), 554.
 
Donovan, J. M. (1994). Defining religion: death and anxiety in an Afro-Brazilian cult. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Tulane University, New Orleans.
 
Downey, A. M. (1984). Relationship of religiosity to death anxiety of middle-aged males. Psychological Reports, 54, 811-822.
 
Durkheim, E. (1967). The elementary forms of the religious life. (J. W. Swain, Trans.). New York, NY: Free Press. (Original work published 1915).
 
Fazio, R. H., & Olson, M. A. (2003). Implicit measures in social cognition research: their meaning and uses. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 297-327.
 
Feuerbach, L. (1967). Lectures on the essence of religion. (R. Manheim, Trans.). New York: NY: Harper & Row, Publishers. (Original work published 1851).
 
Freud, S. (1961). The future of an illusion. (J. Strachey, Trans., Ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1927).
 
Greenberg, J., Landau, M.J., Solomon, S., & Pyszczynski, T. (in press). The case for terror management as the primary psychological function of religion. In D. Wulff (Ed.). Handbook of the psychology of religion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
 
Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: a terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp. 189-212). New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.
 
Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.
 
Haidt, J., Björklund, F., & Murphy, S. (2000). Moral dumbfounding: when intuition finds no reason. Unpublished manuscript, University of Virginia.
 
Harding, S. R., Flannelly, K. J., Weaver, A. J., & Costa, K. G. (2005). The influence of religion on death anxiety and death acceptance. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 8, 253-261.
 
Hartz, G., & Everett, H. C. (1989). Fundamentalist religion and its effect on mental health. Journal of Religion and Health, 28,207-217.
 
Heywood, B. T. (2010). “Meant to be”: how religious beliefs, cultural religiosity, and impaired theory of mind affect the implicit bias to think teleologically. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Queen’s University Belfast, UK.
 
Jong, J., Bluemke, M., & Halberstadt, J. (2012). Fear of death and supernatural beliefs: developing a new Supernatural Belief Scale to test the relationship. Manuscript submitted for peer review.
 
Jong, J., Halberstadt, J., & Bluemke, M.(2012). Foxhole atheism, revisited: The effects of mortality salience on explicit and implicit religious belief. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2012.03.005
 
Landau, M. J., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S. (2004). The motivational underpinnings of religion. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 27, 743-744.
 
Leming, M. R. (1979-1980). Religion and death: a test of Homans’ thesis. Omega, 10, 347-364.
 
Malinowski, B. (1948). Magic, science and religion and other essays. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
 
Mather, R. (2005). The Protestant ethic thesis: Weber’s missing psychology. History of the Human Sciences, 18, 1-16.
 
Marx, K. (1970). Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right (A. Jolin & J. O’Malley, Eds. & Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1843).
 
McMordie, W. R. (1981). Religiosity and fear of death: strength of belief system. Psychological Reports, 49, 921-922.
 
Munzer, S. R. (2005). Self-abandonment and self-denial: Quietism, Calvinism, and the prospect of Hell. Journal of Religious Ethics, 33, 747-781.
 
Nelson, L. D., & Cantrell, C. H. (1980). Religiosity and death anxiety: a multi-dimensional analysis. Review of Religious Research, 21, 148-157.
 
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-259.
 
Norenzayan, A., & Hansen, I. G. (2006). Belief in supernatural agents in the face of death. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 174-187.
 
Nosek, B. A. (2007). Implicit-explicit relations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 65-69.
 
Osarchuk, M., & Tatz, S. J. (1973). Effect of induced fear of death on belief in afterlife. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27, 256-260.
 
Vail III, K. E., Rothschild, Z. K., Weise, D. R., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., & Greenberg, J. (2010). A terror management analysis of the psychological functions of religion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14, 84-94.
 
Sperber, D. (1997). Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind and Language, 12, 67-83.
 
Uhlmann, E. L., Poehlman, T. A., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Implicit theism. In R. M. Sorrentino & S. Yamaguchi, Handbook of motivation and cognition across cultures (p. 71-94). Oxford, UK: Elsevier.
 
Weisbuch, M., Seery, M., Blascovich, J. (2005). On atheists in foxholes: Religious beliefs and death. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Santa Barbara.
 
Wen, Y.-H. (2010). Religiosity and death anxiety. The Journal of Human Resource and Adult Learning, 6, 31-37.
 
Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s cathedral: evolution, religion, and the nature of society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
 
Wink, P., & Scott, J. (2005). Does religiousness buffer against the dear of death and dying in late adulthood? Findings from a longitudinal study. Journal of Gerontology, 60B, 207-214.
 
Wittenbrink, B., & Schwarz, N. (Eds.) (2007). Implicit measures of attitudes. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Tags
immortality
religion
terror management theory